Field of the Invention
This invention concerns a card reading device.
Examples of (but by no means all) card reading devices are the reading devices in mobile telephones for accepting and/or passing on information provided through or for a chip card or a SIM card.
Chip cards and SIM cards are used in mobile telephones primarily for subscriber identification; the structure and function of the chip cards and the SIM cards are generally known and require no further explanation.
Card reading devices are obviously not restricted to use with the chip cards and the SIM cards but can also be used in principle for reading any other cards.
This applies, among other things, for the so-called MM cards, which are currently under development and which will be used in the near future as storage media, or more precisely as mass storage, in semiconductor technology in a wide range of different electronic devices. "MM" is the abbreviation for "multimedia" and thereby serves to express the diversity of applications of MM cards. Although currently available MM cards have a storage capacity of 64 Mbit, storage capacities in the Gbit range are already being regarded as realistic.
Because of the small size of MM cards (most MM cards have a size between that of the SIM cards and that of the chip cards) and the fact that the reading devices for such cards can also be very small (there is no need for motors, moveable reading heads or similar), the use of MM cards in mobile telephones is also conceivable. For example, MM cards could be used in mobile telephones for storing telephone directories, speech (answering-machine function), fax messages, software and similar.
On the other hand, mobile telephones and also many other devices in which MM cards could be used have only very limited space available for the installation of additional card reading devices. A further problem is that changing the cards that must be read must be quick and simple, and that the card reading device should preferably be configured to accept several cards at once.